"Nonsense!" Margaret broke in. "I shall never be what you are----"
"Not what I was, perhaps, because this is another age. Taste and teaching and the art itself--all have changed. But you are young, fresh, untouched, unheard--all, you have it all, as I had once. You are not the artist I am, but you will be one day, and meanwhile you have all I have no more. If I had stayed on the stage, we should have been rivals next season. They would have said: "Cordova has a better voice, but Bonanni is still the greater artist." Do you see?"
"Yes. And why should you not be pleased at that?" asked Margaret. "Or why should not I be quite satisfied, and more than satisfied?"
"I wasn"t thinking of us," said Madame Bonanni, looking up to Margaret"s face with an expression that was almost beautiful, in spite of the daubs of paint and the disarranged hair. "I was thinking of him."
Margaret began to guess, and her lip quivered a moment, for she was touched.
"Yes," she said. "I think I see."
"He loves you," said Madame Bonanni, still looking at her. "I have guessed it. It is very hard for me to get him to like me a little, and he would not forgive me if the really good critics said I was a better artist than you. That would be one thing more against me, my dear, and he has so many things against me already! So I have given it up. Why should I go on singing, now? He does not care any more. When he has once heard you he will never want to come again and sit in the middle of the theatre all alone in the audience just to hear me, as he often did. Then I sang my best. I never sang as I have sung for him, when I have caught sight of his face in the audience. No, not for kings. I used to go and look through the curtain before it went up, if I thought he was there. And it was just to hear me that he came, just for the artistic pleasure! He never came to my dressing-room, for that destroyed the illusion. But now he will go and hear you, and it would make him very bitter against me if any one said I sang better. Do you understand?"
"Yes. I understand."
Margaret bent her head a little and looked down, wondering and puzzled, yet believing.
"At least I can do that for him." Madame Bonanni sighed, looking into the gla.s.s again. "I cannot undo my life, but I need not seem to him to be a hindrance in yours."
It was impossible to receive such a confidence without being deeply touched, and Margaret"s own voice shook a little as she answered.
"There have not been many mothers like you since the world began," she said.
"I will tell you!" The singer turned half round in her chair with one of her sudden movements. "If I had known that I was going to be so fond of him--and oh, my dear, if I could have guessed that he would care so much!--I would have led a different life! I would have left the stage if I could not. Oh, don"t think it is so easy to be good! But it"s possible! One can--one could, if one only knew--for the sake of some one whom one loves very dearly!"
"Of course it is!" answered Margaret, with all the heavenly self-confidence of untried virtue.
Madame Bonanni looked at her with a peculiar expression. There was a little pity in the look, and great doubt, a shade of amus.e.m.e.nt, perhaps, and a great longing envy through it all.
"Of course?" she repeated, in a thoughtful way. "Did you mean "of course it is possible--and easy," my dear? The tone of your voice made me think that was what you meant. Yes--you meant that, and you have a right to mean it, but you don"t know. That"s the great difference--you don"t know! You haven"t begun as I did. You"re a lady, a real lady, brought up amongst ladies from your childhood. But that"s not what will keep you good! It"s not your refinement, nor your good manners, nor your white hands that never milked a cow, or swept a stable, or hoed the weeds out from between the vines in summer. That was my work till I was seventeen. And my mother was a good woman, my dear, just as good as yours, though she was only a peasant of Provence. How do I know it? If she had not been good, my father would have killed her, of course. That was our custom. And he was good, in his way, too, and kind. He always told me that if I went wrong he would shoot me--and when the English artist came and lodged in our house for the summer and made love to me, my father explained everything to him also. So poor Goodyear saw that he must marry me, and we were married, before I was eighteen. He took me away to Paris, and tried to make a lady of me, and he had me taught to sing, because he loved my voice. Do you see? That was how it all happened--and still I was good, as good as you are! Yes--"of course,"
as you say! It was easy enough!"
"He died young, didn"t he?" Margaret asked quietly.
She had seated herself on the corner of the toilet-table to listen, while Madame Bonanni leaned back in the low chair and looked at herself, sometimes absently, some times with pity.
"Yes," she answered. "He died very soon and left me nothing but Tommy and my voice. Poor Goodyear! He painted very badly, he never sold anything, and his father starved him because he had married me. It was far better that he should die of pneumonia than of hunger, for that would certainly have been the end of it.
"And you went on the stage at once?" Margaret asked, wishing to hear more.
Madame Bonanni shrugged her shoulders and leaned forward to the looking-gla.s.s.
"I had a fortune in my throat," she said, daubing rouge on the cheek that was only half done. "I had been well taught in those years, and there were plenty of managers only too anxious to offer me their protection--managers and other people, too. What could I do?"
She shrugged her shoulders again, and laughed a little harshly as she gave a half-shy glance at Margaret. The latter was not a child, but a grown woman of two-and-twenty. She answered gravely.
"With your voice and talent, I don"t see why you needed any protection, as you call it."
Madame Bonanni laughed again.
"No? You don"t see? All the better, little Miss Donne, all the better for you that you have never been made to see, and perhaps you never will now. I hope not. But I tell you that in Paris, or in London, or Berlin, or Petersburg you may have the voice and talent of Malibran, Grisi and Patti all in one, but if you are not "protected" you will never get any further than leading chorus-girl, and perhaps not so far!"
"No one has protected me," said Margaret, "and I"ve got a good engagement."
The prima donna stared at her for a moment in surprise, and then went on making up her face. The girl had talent, genius, perhaps, but she must be oddly simple if she did not realise that she owed her engagement altogether to the woman who was talking to her. Was Margaret going to take that position from the first? Madame Bonanni wondered.
Was she going to deliberately ignore that she had been taken up bodily, as it were, and carried through the short cut to celebrity? Or was it just the simple, stupid, innocent vanity that so often goes with great gifts, making their possessors quite sure that they can never owe the least part of their success to any help received from any one else?
Whatever it might be, Madame Bonanni was not the woman to remind Margaret of what had happened. She only smiled a little and put on more powder.
"I"m not defending my life, my dear," she said, quietly, after a little pause. "Of what use would that be, now that the best part of it is over--or the worst part? I"m not even asking for your sympathy, am I?"
Her voice was suddenly bitter. "I only care for one human being in the world--I think I never cared for any other, since he was born! Does that make my life worse? It does, doesn"t it? In the name of heaven, child," she broke out fiercely and angrily, without the least warning, "was no woman ever flattered into playing at love? Not even by a King?
Am I the only living woman that has been carried off her feet by royalty? It wasn"t only the King, of course--I don"t pretend it was--there were others. But that"s what Tom will never forgive me--the money and the jewels! What could I do? Throw them in his face, scream outraged virtue and cry that he was offending me, when he had nothing more to ask, and I was half drunk with pride and vanity and amus.e.m.e.nt, because he was really in love? Tell some great lady, your d.u.c.h.ess, your princess, to do that sort of thing--if you think she will! Don"t ask it of a Provence girl who has milked the cows and hoed the vines, and then suddenly has half Europe at her feet, and a King into the bargain!
There was only one thing in the world that could have saved me then--it would have been to know that Tom would never forgive me. And he was only a little boy--how could I guess?"
She looked up almost wildly into Margaret"s eyes, and then bent down, resting her forehead upon her hands, on the edge of the table.
"Don"t be afraid," she said, "I"m not going to cry again--never again, I think! It"s over and finished, with the other things!"
She remained in the same position nearly a minute, and then sat up quite straight before the gla.s.s, as if nothing had happened, and powdered her cheeks again.
Margaret sat still on the corner of the table, not at all sure of what she had better say or do. She only hoped that Madame Bonanni would not ask her whether she cared for Lushington and would marry him, supposing that his scruples could be overcome, and she had a strong suspicion that it was to ask this that Madame Bonanni had come to see her. It would be rather hard to answer, Margaret knew, and she turned over words and expressions in her mind.
She might have spared herself the trouble, for nothing could have been further from her companion"s thoughts just then. The dramatic moment had pa.s.sed and Margaret had scarcely noticed it, beyond being very much surprised at the news it had brought her of the great singer"s retiring from the stage. Perhaps, too, Margaret was a little inclined to doubt whether Madame Bonanni would abide by her resolution in the future, though she was perfectly in earnest at present.
"I shall be at your first night," said the prima donna, finishing her operations at last, and carefully shutting her little gold box. "If you have a dress rehearsal, I"ll be at that, too."
"Thank you," Margaret answered. "Yes--there is to be a dress rehearsal on Sunday. Schreiermeyer insists on it for me. He"s afraid I shall have stage fright because I"m so cool now, I suppose."
She laughed, contentedly and perfectly sure of herself.
"The only thing I don"t like is being brought on in the sack to sing that last scene."
"Eh?" Madame Bonanni stared in surprise.
"The sack," Margaret repeated. "The last scene. Don"t you know?"
"I know--but it"s always left out. n.o.body has sung that for years. It"s a chorus-girl who is brought on in the bag, and when Rigoletto sees her face he screams and the curtain goes down. You don"t mean to say that Schreiermeyer wants you to do the whole scene?
"Yes. We"ve rehea.r.s.ed it ever so often. I thought it was strange, too.
He says that if it does not please people at the dress rehearsal, we can leave it out on the real night."
"I never heard of anything so ridiculous in my life!" Madame Bonanni was evidently displeased.
She had once done the "sack" scene herself to satisfy the caprice of a foreign sovereign who wished to see the effect of it, and she had a vivid and disagreeable recollection of being half dragged, half carried, inside a brown canvas bag, and then put down rather roughly; and then, of not knowing at what part of the stage she was, while she listened to Rigoletto s voice; and of the strong, dusty smell of the canvas, that choked her, so that she wanted to cough and sneeze when Rigoletto tore open the bag and let her head out; and then, of having to sing in a very uncomfortable position; and, altogether, of a most disagreeable quarter of an hour just at the very time when she should have been getting her wig and paint off in her dressing-room. Moreover, the scene was a failure, as it always has been wherever it has been tried. She told Margaret this.
"At all events," she concluded, "you won"t have to do it on the real night."
They were in the larger room again. But for the decided damage done to her sleeve by her tears, Madame Bonanni had restored her outward appearance tolerably well. She stood at the corner of the piano, resting one hand upon it.
"I"m sorry for you, my dear," she said cheerfully, because I"ve given you so much trouble, but I"m glad I cried as much as I wanted to. It"s horribly bad for the voice and complexion, but nothing really refreshes one so much. I felt as if my heart were going to break when I got here."